General Discussion on Promising Strategies

As observed in the above tables, all the groups of subjects tended to use more explicit strategies to make a promise. Over 60 percent of the participants chose to make a promise with a clear statement of the future act. The most common way to form a promise was to state exactly what the specific future act would be and when it would be carried out, as in (9):

(9) Deng wo sao wan di jiu qu bang ni wait 1SG sweep finish floor then go help 2SG na sezhi.

get color paper

‗I‘ll get the color paper for you after I have swept the floor.‘ (G2S2, Q1)

The participant (G2S2) promised to ―get the color paper‖ (what) ―after sweeping the floor‖ (when). The usage of the performative verb daying ‗promise‘ was rarely found in our data, even in the production of the control group. Usage of the performative verb daying ‗promise‘ was not used increasingly with age, indicating that the lack of the performative verb daying in Chinese-speaking children‘s expressions of making

promises cannot represent their ability of making promises. This result differs from Astington‘s (1988b) findings that children aged between 8 and 11 presented their preference for making promises with the performative verb ‗promise.‘ For them, the explicit performative verb could best convey their intention of accomplishing a future act to the promisee. However, in Chinese, it is uncommon to use the performative verb daying ‗promise‘ in spoken language to make a promise, which was also found in our pilot study.

With regard to the effects of social status, significant differences were found between the promises made to a person with higher and lower social status. All groups of participants tended to use a more explicit expression to make promises to a person with high social status. Furthermore, conditional clauses like ruguo wo you kong de

hua ‗if I have time‘ and uncertain expressions like zaishuo ‗we‘ll talk about it later‘

were mostly used toward a promisee with lower social status, indicating that the participants regarded the promises made to a person with high social status as more important, as shown in (10) and (11):

(10) Laoshi, dengyixia xie wan gongke wo jiu qu bang teacher wait write finish homework 1SG then go help ni huahua. Yinwei duixiang shi laoshi, tongchang dui 2SG draw because subject COP teacher usually to

zhangbei jianghua jiuyao jiang qingchu.

senior talk must say clear

‗After I finish my homework I‘ll help you draw a picture, Teacher. Because I‘m talking with the teacher—an adult— I have to spell it out clearly. (G5S15, Q16)

(11) Dengyixia zaikankan. Dui didi meimei zheyang

perfunctory. As someone else‘s younger brother or sister, you have to have the ability to differentiate their tone. If my older brother were to speak to me like this, I know he wouldn‘t teach me.‘ (G5S 15, Q12)

This subject of the control group (G5S15) provided her own explanation for making promises with different strategies toward people with different social status. In her opinion, the promisee‘s social status would affect the way she made promises.

However, in Astington‘s (1988b) study, she found that children responded similarly to their mothers and siblings while making commissive speech. It is evident that cultural differences play an important role in language use. In Chinese society, children are taught to show respect to the elders since jing lao zun xian ‗respecting one‘s elders‘

and zun shi zhong dao ‗respect one‘s teachers and morals‘ are traditional virtues that are highly valued especially in early childhood. Chinese-speakers tend to be respectful toward elders. However, to a person from a younger generation, Chinese-speakers may not modify their speech in any special way. In traditional Chinese culture, Chongyang Festival ‗the festival of showing respect to elders‘ is celebrated on September ninth of the lunar calendar. Reverence to elders in Chinese culture might account for the difference in performance seen among the subjects when making a promise to a person with higher and lower social status.

When it comes to the promiser‘s sincerity, in all the groups, more explicit strategies of making a promise were employed by the participants in the sincere

conditions than in the insincere conditions. More vague expressions of promises, such as conditional clauses and markers of uncertainty, were used in the insincere conditions. Consider the following example:

(12) Dengyixia kankan ruguo you shijian zai dai ni qu wait see if have time then take 2SG go youyong.

swim

‗We‘ll see. If I have time, I‘ll take you to swim.‘ (G5S20, Q13)

When the participant (G5S20) did not intend to accomplish a future act for the addressee, they tended to leave some room for themselves so that they would have excuses for not keeping the promises. As illustrated in (12), the promiser will take the promisee to go swimming only if he ―has time‖. The conditional clause implies that if the promiser does not ―have time‖, he will not take the promisee to go swimming. The promiser can thus shirk responsibility if he does not keep the promise, and assumes that the promisee is aware of the implication of the conditional clause.

By making a promise in a more explicit way, ambiguities can be avoided between the promiser‘s utterances and the promisee‘s inference. As mentioned in (8) in Section 4.4.3, the phrase dengyixia ‗wait a moment‘ yields two different meanings:

to accomplish the action in a short while or to talk about it in a moment. If the promiser makes a promise implicitly on purpose to violate the Maxim of Quantity, implicature may arise. This is possible when the promiser does so to hide the insincerity of accomplishing a future act for the promisee. When the promise is made without adequate information, only the promiser will know whether s/he has actually made a promise. The results of our production task were consistent with the findings of the comprehension task shown in the previous sections that the participants were more likely to recognize an explicit promise as an effective promise.